Baxter Creek Watershed Alliance Winner of Peterborough’s inaugural Rotary Environmental Innovators Award

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The Rotary Club of Peterborough and Cleantech Commons awarded $10,000 to five environmental innovators in Peterborough area.

Baxter Creek Watershed Alliance (BCWA) proudly accepted the top $3,000 Rotary Environmental Innovator award at an event on Thursday evening (April 27) at Camp Kawartha in Douro-Dummer. Directors Noel Kerin, George Raab, and Craig Onafrychuk accepted the aware on behalf of BCWA.

BCWA was selected out of a pool of 16 applications from across the Peterborough region. In their acceptance speech, BCWA highlighted their work on raising public awareness on the value of our local ecosystem services and the values those services provide for the community and the species dependent on them.

The panel of environmental science and technology experts from the Rotary Club recognized that while the structure of BCWA is like other “watershed guardian” organizations what makes BCWA unique is their strategy of collaboration, engagement, and solution development. The innovative aspects of BCWA’s work were highlighted, including the implementation of the Baxter Creek Watershed Hub which is built using software and services donated from the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) Canada. BCWA was selected to be a member of Esri’s Non Profit Program and are using Esri’s Geographic Information System (GIS) software and services, coupled with web hosting services, to transform data into information, information into knowledge products, with the long-term goal to help inform wise planning decisions across our watersheds.

This innovative Watershed Hub has become a platform for engaging partners and for supporting collaborative environmental education and skill development projects with students from Fleming College and Trent University. BCWA is also using this platform to build citizen science monitoring applications and web maps for members of the local community. KG

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